Thank goodness for shingles.
Just as a spider’s bite initiated Peter Parker’s Spiderman super powers, a bout with shingles in 2007 commenced my own version of a super power: a tingling along my shingles’ nerve path that warns of stress long before I’m consciously aware of it. It can happen when I over schedule myself (while adamantly claiming I haven’t) and when I ingest too much media – television news and talk shows, talk radio, magazines and newspapers.
When I feel the tingle, it’s my body’s “Danger, Will Robinson” cry for help to reduce stress now!
If you are the parents of a middle schooler and caught Friday’s Mid-Morning with Dr. Brenda Hunter and her adult daughter Kristen Blair, co-authors of From Santa to Sexting: Helping Your Child Safely Navigate Middle School and Shape the Choices that Last a Lifetime (Leafwood), and if you had my Tingling Super Power, it would have gone into full alert: one dismal and disheartening statistics about middle schoolers and their involvement with drugs, sex and risky behaviors after another. That kind of news can make parents feel defeated or lead them to enact more family rules than the IRS tax code.
But as we moved from one serious middle schooler issue to the next, Dr. Hunter and Kristen Blair did something very biblical: they reminded us of the Greater Reality that can easily evade us. Paul declares it in Colossians 1:17 – “He (Jesus) existed before everything else began, and He holds all things together.”
Jesus is God. There is nothing in life – no issue, no person, no circumstance – that can overtake and conquer our God, Whose Spirit, which raised Christ from the dead, lives in us!
Life is and will be stressful. (How's that for stating the obvious?) When life gets tingly, here’s what I do:
1. Immerse myself in scriptures that remind me of all that God is and all that He has promised.
2. Play songs that proclaim God’s “Godness” – Wonderful, Merciful Savior, Your Name, Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, Soon (featuring Brook Fraser – wow!) and sing along…loudly!
3. Sit with Jesus, praying, listening and basking in His love.
Trust Jesus. He’s got everything under control.
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